Of Mice And Men

[depakid]

America has the meanest of politics today, and by that I don't mean small.

America also has the most impoverished of politics today, and by that I do mean small.

It's hard to imagine us practicing a political discourse more trivial than the one we do today. It's difficult to imagine a politics less suited to addressing the grave problems facing the country in our time. It's hard to see how our policy-making machinery could be very much more broken than it is, short of the Weimar Republic anyhow (and, some days, it doesn't seem so short of that at all).

It's in this context, especially, that I will miss Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens, who announced his retirement from the Court this week. Stevens is not just an old-timer, and one of the longest-serving justices on the Court in all of American history, but he is literally and figuratively an anachronism - an alien from another time. And, in many ways, it was a substantially better time.

To get a sense of how much that is so, it's worth noting that we are talking about a guy who is, or was at least, probably a Republican. We know for sure that he was appointed by the Republican president, Gerry Ford. Talk about a long time ago. Stevens is such a dinosaur, he comes from the era when Republicans weren't all Neanderthals. And I don't refer just to their abysmal politics, either, nor even to the fundamental deceitfulness at the core of those politics. What distinguishes the post-Ford Party of Reagan more than that is their meanness, their smallness, and their sheer destructiveness.

But I often worry that the scariest effect of our times - especially for people who have the mixed fortune of being younger than I am - is not so much that we have already, or might soon, lose entirely a level of decency in our politics, but far worse still, that we will lose the capacity to imagine decency. Such concerns always bring me back to the beautifully rendered nightmare of Orwell's 1984, where the greatest achievement of the regime was just that - its success in stripping the citizenry of the ability to even verbalize alternative visions.

I wonder about that today. For anyone who is, say, forty years old or younger in America - quite a large proportion of the population - do they even understand that politics doesn't have to practiced in the way it has been since Reagan turned the GOP into a party of thugs, and Clinton led the Democrats into their role as thug-enablers? Do they know that it actually was once different, not so long ago? Can an alternative praxis, which is not even theoretical but quite real in recent history, still be envisioned?

More: http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/david_michael_green/28072/of_mice_and_men

[ananda]

1. Geez

If you're going to use the title Of Mice and Men, you
should at least make a worshipful and pithy reference
to John Steinbeck, the greatest author of all time and
champion of labor rights.

[depakid]

2. Not the greatest title, but one of the better pieces this particular author has written